


find my way back to you

by accioharry



Category: Prodigal Son (TV 2019)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Feelings Realization, Fluff and Angst, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:07:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23835115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/accioharry/pseuds/accioharry
Summary: She sits across from him, still avoiding his gaze, and Malcolm gives up to stare at the metal table he is handcuffed to. Dani had not said a single word to him since she muttered, “I’m sorry,” as she handcuffed him in his apartment. What on earth could she be sorry for? She’s not the one who ruined the best thing that had ever happened to him simply by existing.post 1x19, pre-finale. inspired by the song "find my way back" by eric arjes.
Relationships: Malcolm Bright & Dani Powell, Malcolm Bright/Dani Powell
Comments: 7
Kudos: 83





	find my way back to you

**Author's Note:**

> i call this "12am running with a theory to soothe my pain from last week's episode". please ignore any mistakes, i'm exhausted and not happy with the writing tense issues, but here we are. regardless, i hope you enjoy. 
> 
> the title and inspiration for this fic come from the song "find my way back" by eric arjes.

He didn’t want to see her. He wanted to see anybody but her.

Trust was never in her vocabulary, and especially not in his, but Malcolm found himself on a mission to get Dani Powell to trust him from almost the day they met in the elevator with Gil. She was a case he wanted to solve, a mystery he wanted to know every single detail about. Something about her intrigued him and every day he felt as though he needed to know more. She was annoyed with him at first, and probably always is, but slowly, he caught her starting to open up, bit by bit. Once he saw that, he caught on to it and never wanted to let go.

Which is why as he sits handcuffed in the interrogation room, the same handcuffs she put on him an hour ago, he prays to whoever will listen that Gil or JT walk in the door because he physically can’t look at her right now. Not when he ruined everything he had worked so hard for. The silence in the room feels as though it is crushing him alive, and he doesn’t have the strength to fight back. His survival instincts aren’t kicking in anymore, and he realizes he’s not even a little upset about it.

He winces when the door opens because of course the universe is never done with him, and Dani walks in with a file in her arms. Her leather jacket is missing, presumably at her desk, and her long-sleeve gray shirt covers her fingers like mittens. She doesn’t even bother to look at him.

A defense mechanism, Malcolm notices. He feels his heart start to break even more. He had always considered Dani a friend, nothing more than that because he never let himself go to that point. He didn’t want to push her too far away by encouraging the idea of them ever being anything more in the distant future, but looks like he did it anyway. How did he screw up without even trying?

She sits across from him, still avoiding his gaze, and Malcolm gives up to stare at the metal table he is handcuffed to. Dani had not said a single word to him since she muttered, “I’m sorry,” as she handcuffed him in his apartment. What on earth could she be sorry for? She’s not the one who ruined the best thing that had ever happened to him simply by _existing._

The two of them sit in silence for a moment before Dani softly slides the file across towards him. He’s seen enough interrogations to know how it works, knows he should get a lawyer, and stay quiet. He couldn’t convince her, let alone the team that he was being framed, and it seemed like everything he did would incriminate him more. His eyes widen to see Dani open the file, and it’s completely empty. He whips his head up to look at her. For the first time in his life, he has no idea what is going on. She stares back at him.

Her voice is soft, as though she is afraid to speak out loud. “We had to get you out of your apartment.”

He wants to joke with her to make her feel better, but he decides not to. “By arresting me?”

She nods. He notices the dark circles under her eyes, circles he hadn’t seen since the time she came to visit him in the hospital after Watkins. When was the last time she had slept, and how did he not notice? He answers his own question, the gut-wrenching memory of Eve’s body flooding his memories. He was so preoccupied with her murder, he didn’t pay attention to what was going on in his surroundings. It wasn’t like him to do that.

“Dani,” he starts, not missing how she doesn’t look him in the eye. “Please, you know I didn’t do this.”

She doesn’t answer him. If he thought losing Eve was painful, why does this hurt so much more? Why does Dani avoiding his gaze make him feel as though Watkins stabbed him all over again?

“Dani,” he pleads, “come on, you know I didn’t kill him!” It takes everything in him to not get mad at her. Dani is a detective and a damn good one at that. She looks at the evidence and makes her conclusions, just as he does. Her mind is already made up. For someone who spent his entire life avoiding emotional confrontations, he just wants to see her feel something. “Dani!”

“Stop,” she mutters, barely loud enough for him to hear, but he does. His posture changes, he goes into red alert because just as he did when they first met, he latched onto whatever she gave him, regardless of how small it was. “Not now.”

The way she says it implies there’s something more going on, but Malcolm can’t figure it out. Dani had always been good at putting up walls, but this was an entirely new side of her Malcolm had never seen before. A side he wanted to hold and keep safe from whatever demons hurt her in the past, but now? He was one of those demons, and he hated himself for it.

“You’re not telling me something,” he says after a moment of silence. He feels himself getting agitated.

“What, you’re going to profile me?” She scoffs. Her eyes narrow directly at him and she puts her elbows on the table. “This is already decided, Bright. We know what you did, I know what you did.”

“No, you don’t!” He knows better than to argue with her, let alone the NYPD, but he was frustrated. For a profiler, for someone who knew every interrogation tactic back to front, he thought he was going to lose his own mind.

“Really?” Her demeanor changes suddenly, and Malcolm finds himself leaning back in his chair when she stands suddenly, kicking the chair back behind her as she leans towards him. “You didn’t kill him? Just like you didn’t shove Watkins in a box? Just like your Father didn’t kill those 23 young girls? You didn’t end up just like him?”  
He wants to stand up and fight her, and he almost does. If it was anyone else, he would have. He feels the rage in his blood, for Dani to turn around and to use this against him, knowing how he spent his entire life fighting everyone’s opinions of him before they even met him. How he let himself believe Dani was the one thing in his life he hadn’t screwed up.

Wait a minute.

He holds her gaze for a moment as his brain does the rapid calculations. He remembers her demeanor when she came into the room, the sudden rage she had when she looked at him. He remembers sitting in the car with her, talking about the terrible movie that played in his head. He remembers the wedding, of working together nearly perfectly. He remembers her opening up about her undercover years, about her past. He remembers her soft smile when he admitted that she was the one he liked talking to. He remembers Dani, the woman who never judged him for his family, and the woman in front of him is not her.

He glances up at the camera in the corner of the room, at the window behind her where he knows Gil and JT are watching and listening to his every move. He glances down at Dani’s hands, one still covered by her sleeve. He looks at her face, noticing how her eyes keep blinking back what look very closely to be tears, tears she refuses to let fall.

“Okay,” he speaks slowly, cautiously. His brain remembers how Eve died, how she got too close to Endicott. How Endicott easily wove his way into the lives of his mother and his sister. “I didn’t do this.”

The door opens, JT and Gil enter the room swiftly. JT reaches to the camera on the wall before unplugging the power. Gil starts to undo Malcolm’s handcuffs.

“We’re good,” he says, and Dani collapses into the chair she stood from. She buries her head in her arms.

“Thank God,” she shivers, and Malcolm stands when his hands are free, shaking his wrists out.

“What the hell is going on?” He looks between the three of them.

“Your apartment was bugged, Endicott set you up for murder to get you off of his case. Your mom and Ainsley are on their way here,” JT speaks fast. “We didn’t know if the precinct was bugged, and we didn’t want to hold off on the interrogation while we checked because that could take a long time—”

“and Endicott would catch on if there were delays,” Malcolm nodded, his eyes never leaving Dani. “So you had to make it believable.”

Dani looks up at him then, and Malcolm realizes how drained she is from the past ten minutes. “You know I…we know you didn’t kill anyone.”

“Dani,” he wants to pull her into his arms to reassure her that he knows her, and knows she didn’t mean the words that came out of her mouth.

She shakes her head. “I need some air,” she leaves the interrogation room suddenly, and Malcolm immediately follows her into Gil’s office. She’s shaking, and her hand is running over her face repeatedly. She’s anxious, borderline terrified, and Malcolm recognizes it instantly.

“Can we talk here?” He looks around the room.

“The entire precinct is on lockdown, this place has been swept from top to bottom, we’re fine. I’m fine,” she goes to brush him off, but he’s faster and catches her wrist.

“Hey,” he tilts his head to the side, studying her with the amused look on his face that always earned an eye roll from her. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not,” she pulls her hand away from him. “Even if it wasn’t real, I should never have used your father against you—”

“Endicott would expect you too,” he cuts her off.

“Well, Endicott isn’t here—”

“You didn’t know that,” he cuts her off again. “Dani, I’m not hurt or mad at you. Please don’t think I am.”

When she meets his gaze, he visibly relaxes because he recognizes the eyes staring at him. Dani is back, his Dani, and for a moment he feels okay again.  
“I just don’t want anything to happen,” she admits. Malcolm knows her walls are still up, but these are walls he’s worked through many times, and he’d do it a million more if it kept her in his life.

“You know we can’t promise that,” Malcolm says, and part of him still wonders if he’s technically under arrest, because if he’s been framed, what exactly does that mean for him? He shakes it off. “We’ll get through this Dani, just as we got through everything else thrown at us.”

“I’m not worried about that,” she chuckles softly, and Malcolm forces himself to not think about how much he loves her laugh. Now is not the time to reconsider the idea of being something more with her, someday. Not when he’s been arrested for murder.

“I just don’t like change,” she admits. “If we can’t prove you were set up…and Endicott somehow wins and you go to prison…” she trails off, which Malcolm had previously noticed she did when she did not want to finish a sentence that seemed personal.

“That’s fair, prison isn’t as glamourous as my father makes it look,” he shrugs, and Dani laughs for real at that. “I wouldn’t have my partner to keep me from being reckless either,” he laughs when Dani glares at him.

“I take it back, maybe prison would be good for you. It’d give me time to get my sanity back.”

“Haha,” he counters. “You’d miss me, you just won’t admit it.”

She walks past him to the door. “While you keep telling yourself that, I’m going to save your ass, again.”

He laughs and watches her walk out the door before his face falls. “Wait, what do you mean _again_?!”


End file.
